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Mongolian-Chinese Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Lexical Feature

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Chinese Computational Linguistics (CCL 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11856))

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Abstract

Machine translation has achieved impressive performance with the advances in deep learning and rely on large scale parallel corpora. There have been a large number of attempts to extend these successes to low-resource language, yet requiring large parallel sentences. In this study, we build the Mongolian-Chinese neural machine translation model based on unsupervised methods. Cross-lingual word embedding training plays a crucial role in unsupervised machine translation which generative adversarial networks (GANs) training methods only perform well between two closely-related languages, yet the self-learning method can learn high-quality bilingual embedding mappings without any parallel corpora in low-source language. In this work, apply the self-learning method is better than using GANs to improve the BLEU score of 1.0. On this basis, we analyze the Mongolian word lexical features and use stem-affixes segmentation in Mongolian to replace the Bytes-Pair-Encoding (BPE) operation, so that the cross-lingual word embedding training is more accurate, and obtain higher quality bilingual words embedding to enhance translation performance. We reporting BLEU score of 15.2 on the CWMT2017 Mongolian-Chinese dataset, without using any parallel corpora during training.

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Correspondence to Hongxu Hou .

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Wu, Z., Hou, H., Guo, Z., Wang, X., Sun, S. (2019). Mongolian-Chinese Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation with Lexical Feature. In: Sun, M., Huang, X., Ji, H., Liu, Z., Liu, Y. (eds) Chinese Computational Linguistics. CCL 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11856. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32381-3_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32381-3_27

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-32380-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-32381-3

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